Introduction

Now that you know what hardware is present on your system, it's time to
actually do something with it all. It's not enough to simply plug devices
into a power source and machine busyou should be able to guess by now that
nothing in UNIX is that "automagical."

As always, our philosophy is to present the information that you will need on
the spot and then flesh it out with background details. Although we intend for
you to be able to do your job as quickly as possible, we'd also like you to
be able to understand why you are doing these particular tasks and
issuing these specific commands.

In this chapter, we examine the logical constructs that UNIX provides for
accessing physical drives and other devices. In the next chapter, we will
populate the local disks with users and discuss their proper care and
feeding.